AMG Review of Academy Award Winning Music from MGM: 1939-1965

Evan Cater
All Music Guide

This compilation includes all of the songs and excerpts from all the scores that won Academy Awards for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer between 1939 and 1965. MGM dominated the music categories during that period, winning more song and score Oscars than any other studio. This retrospective includes several pieces that demonstrate the durabilty of MGM's output during that era. The original Judy Garland recording of "Over the Rainbow," for example, has certainly stood the test of time even if Howard Arlen's Oscar-winning score for #The Wizard of Oz (represented here by the "Main Title") seems cloying and dated today. The disc includes several other tunes that are heard almost as frequently today a they were in their own times: Oscar Hammerstein's "The Last Time I Saw Paris" (the last Best Song winner that wasn't written expressly for the film), Frank Loesser's "Baby, It's Cold Outside," Irving Berlin's "Anything You Can Do," written for Annie Get Your Gun. The list is long and impressive. Of course, it's probably too much to ask that a collection of award winning music from 30-60 years ago will be without a few clunkers. The worst are probably Louis Jordan's laughable spoken performance of the insipid theme song from Gigi and the -- God help us -- eight minute version of "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Sante Fe." But on the whole, this collection holds up better than a lot of the Best Song winners from the '70s and '80s.